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games, music, and musings on the internet

Showing Win-Loss Records

One thing I’ve noticed from this round of the Overwatch beta, is that Blizzard chose to show win-loss records in your career profile. Another thing I’ve noticed is people leaving games if they’re going poorly, and generally leaving games after they’ve lost (instead of playing the next round on the opposite side). And part of me wonders if these two aren’t connected.

Showing win-loss records on non-ranked modes, especially when you can join and leave at any point in the match (unlike a game of Heroes of the Storm or LoL), seems like it’s only going to cause more harm than good.

  • It discourages playing new heroes that you’re bad at
  • It makes joining a game in progress where a team is losing feel extremely bad
  • It requires Blizzard to have to deal with all sorts of cases that only matter in the context of loss tracking: Should you get a loss if you leave a game at any time? Should you get a loss if you are put into a losing game? If so, what if you only join 30s before the end of the match?

Granted, your win-loss ratio is only shown when looking at a player’s career profile, so it’s not as if it’s pushed on other players when you join a game, but it is still something you see everytime you look at your own player profile. And as far as I can tell, there is literally no benefit to tracking this for players.

For a ranked mode, by all means track win-loss. But also make sure people can’t join and leave arbitrarily, so a loss accurately reflects a loss. I do think you can and should track wins for normal games, and even tracking win % for individual characters (so you know who you’re good at) probably doesn’t hurt. But for normal matchmaking, it doesn’t seem like the ROI is there.

Games I Played in 2015

I started attempting to keep track of all the games I’ve been playing each year - it ends up adding up to a lot! You gotta stay current, ya know? Obviously, I didn’t play all of these in equal amounts, and in many cases I barely played them at all (for various reasons). For PC & mobile games I tried to distinguish between ones I legitimately played multiple times for a reasonable amount of time, vs ones I just dipped my toe into.

PC

Actually played

  • Civilization 5 (vanilla, co-op) - I’d played Civ 5 before, but this was the first time playing it co-op with a friend, and it worked remarkably well despite my worries about pacing. Civ 2 is still the best Civ there is, but 5 is pretty damn good.
  • Prismata - Not sure how to describe this except as a mashup between a card game, RTS, and Dominion (shared central pool of cards), except it’s not a deckbuilding game, there’s no randomness, and there is perfect information. It’s neat - give it a try!
  • Gunpoint - I played and beat this, but I always felt like I was brute forcing my way through the puzzles instead of being very clever. But the story is actually pretty great, and the wiring mechanic is a lot of fun to play with.
  • Smite - Played this a few times with a few friends who had never played any MOBAs, and the biggest takeaway for me is that 3rd-person/1st-person action controls are way more familiar to most people than RTS/top-down controls, and they also provide a much more immediately satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay. This group of friends (I don’t think) would ever want to play League of Legends, but Smite was at least interesting enough to hook them for a while.
  • Borderlands: Pre-Sequel (co-op) - This was bad and you shouldn’t play it. I don’t know what happened between Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, but the group of us that finished Borderlands 2 together, played a few hours of this and never looked back. On the plus side I got to play as Claptrap which was pure insanity.
  • Luftrausers - A very well-done Vlambeer arcade shoot-em-up with a weird alternate World War II wrapping. Recommend.
  • Heroes of the Storm - I got SUPER into this for awhile, and was playing every day at work over lunch. I particularly like (1) the shorter game length vs LoL, and (2) Stitches. Once I earned my Stitches Master Skin, I stopped. A lesson in goals and motivation in games.
  • Borderlands 2 (co-op again) - Early on in the year we were desperately hunting for new co-op games to play, and playing Borderlands 2 again seemed like the best option, despite having beaten it once already. It didn’t last long enough the second time around for me to beat it again, but I did learn some obscure mechanics like health-gating from this Zer0 melee build guide (which I unfortunately never got high enough level to try and implement).
  • Crypt of the Necrodancer - Rhythm game + roguelike, with an amazing soundtrack. One of my favorite games this year, and usually under $5 when it’s on sale on Steam.
  • Don’t Starve: Together - I guess I’m not sure what I expected. A few friends and I tried to get into this but it was so damn hard to get any kind of sustainable town going that it always ended being hours of desperately eking by before everyone died and we had to start over again. It didn’t help that none of us had played Don’t Starve before, but the learning curve was too steep on this one for us.
  • World of Tanks (for real this time) - I tried World of Tanks exactly once years ago, but at the urging of our head of game design at work, I gave it another shot. WoT is worth playing particularly for learning about the monetization and progression systems. The actual combat ends up being interesting once you know what is going on (but the vast majority of mechanics are never explained unless you read an absurdly long wiki).
  • Hammerwatch (co-op) - Kept us entertained for a few sessions, but ultimately there wasn’t enough variety in the play or character builds to keep me coming back. It was definitely worth the few bucks it cost though.
  • Hearthstone (again) - I never got really into Hearthstone, but the Tavern Brawl mechanic was a really nice touch that made me venture back a little. It serves a bit of the same purpose that ARAM mode in League of Legends does for me - not super serious (like Ranked or Arena), but still interesting for casual players. (Plus you get a pack every week!)
  • Overwatch - I wrote a long article on Overwatch here. I very much liked it, and am excited to see how the game changes toward launch next year.
  • Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin - I’ve put about 16 hours in and am nowhere near close to finishing this game. This is another game I never would have played but for someone at work pushing it on me. I’m glad I did (it’s the best combat I’ve experienced in a game), though I have to be in the right mood to sit down and play. This Gamasutra article does a great job of selling the game.
  • NEO Scavenger - I just picked this up near the end of the year and so I haven’t put too much time in yet, but I’ve always loved the idea of this kind of game. The atmosphere, mechanics, feel. So far the interface is the only thing really getting in the way of me enjoying the game, but I haven’t tried to learn all the hotkeys yet. I’m also not a big fan of the crafting system so far (it seems quite tedious), but hope to put in some more time exploring this year.
  • Far Cry 4 (co-op) - Zach and I play a lot of co-op games together, and Far Cry 4 was our latest. The co-op experience is much better than Far Cry 3 in that you can actually play through the real game together, clearing outposts in one friend’s game. You can’t progress the main questline, but that’s far less interesting than working together to take enemy camps. It makes me wonder why there aren’t more games out there like it. Also, the environment is beautiful.

Tried

  • World of Warships - Didn’t need another World of Tanks grind, and I like tanks more than ships anyway.
  • How to Survive - Never got sucked into this, and I may never make it back. I hear there is a co-op mode coming though, and I’m always a sucker for that.
  • Witcher 3 (very briefly) - Got a free copy, played less than an hour, and then wandered off to play other things. I’ll probably come back and play this for real at some point, but it requires such an investment that I wasn’t ready for yet.
  • Wargame: European Escalation - I’m still not sure how this game works.
  • Duelyst - Loved the graphical style, didn’t want another Hearthstone-style grind for a game that I wasn’t that excited to play. Tactics-style games have never been my particular jam.
  • Supernova (Bandai Namco) - Another take on a F2P MOBA. What the world needs is more MOBAs.
  • Dirty Bomb - F2P class-based shooter, but with a weird F2P bent. Classes you get can be the same name but different rarities of the same class can have different loadouts and perks (e.g., the Bronze version of a class has more perks than the Lead version). You can open boxes to try and get higher rarity versions, or craft your way there. The highest rarities don’t gain more perks or power, only cosmetic differences. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.
  • World of Guns: Gun Disassembly - I don’t know, I got this for free somehow. It was oddly soothing.

Console

  • Destiny [PS4] (co-op w/ Zach) - I decided I needed to play more console games to see how the other half lives. Destiny is actually pretty fun - who knew? The story is garbage, but the combat feels great (even though I am absolutely abysmal with a controller) and the progression systems have distilled a lot of what was great about WoW into a concentrated experience. It’s also the first console game I played that really felt alive and run as a game-as-a-service. I suspect I’ll be playing this for some time yet.
  • Just Dance 2016 [PS4] - There is nothing better to make you look like a complete fool than Just Dance + the PS4 camera.
  • Nintendoland [Wii U] - The co-op games in the bundle are meh but the 4v1 games are really fun and put the gamepad to great use. One player uses the gamepad and sees a different set of things on their screen, and the other players look at the TV and generally have to work together in some way to defeat the player on the gamepad.
  • Super Smash Bros [Wii U] - It’s still Smash, it’s still fun, and I’m still terribly bad at fighting games.
  • Mariokart 8 [Wii U] - Another excellent entry in the Mariokart series. It’s slightly easier in the sense that they removed some of the tricks from the earlier games (pressing ‘B’ when you hit a banana, and the power sliding mechanics are simply time-based), but it’s still a lot of fun. The DLC is also worth it, and in particular 200cc is completely insane. Everything you know about driving in 150cc goes out the window.

Mobile (iOS)

I played all of these on iOS but most of them are available for Android as well.

Actually played

  • Heroes Charge - A clone of a Chinese game (Dota Legend) that itself steals all the characters/abilities from Dota, which in turn takes a lot of characters and icons from Warcraft III. Nevermind the lineage, the real interesting thing here is the progression system. In Heroes Charge, the progression system is the game. And it’s actually a pretty fun one at that, though in the end you realize it’s an endless treadmill. But while it lasts, it is a fantastic example of continual power progression, fragmented loot drops, VIP systems, different gameplay modes that force different team mechanics, and Chinese-style rolling servers and leaderboards.
  • Game of War (still) - I was playing this for competitive intelligence in 2014, and at least through the first part of 2015, I was still playing. This is another game like Heroes Charge in the sense that what we might traditionally view as the “game” is garbage, and it’s the systems surrounding it that make it fun (for some people). For Game of War it’s the social systems around guilds, server-vs-server battles, and chat that make it worth understanding. It also prints money and has terrible TV ads.
  • Battleheart: Legacy - Action-RPG with surprising amounts of character customization. Apparently the end-game class customization is quite interesting, but I got really turned off by the early grind.
  • DomiNations - The best Clash-like I played last year. It’s really an incremental change on top of Clash, and so it could only keep my attention for so long (I am so tired of playing Clash clones), but it’s still a decent entry.
  • Marvel Contest of Champions - I tried to get into this. I’m not into comics, and so a lot of the appeal is lost on me. The fighting mechanics are the same as Injustince (on iOS), which I’d already played, and I really wasn’t interested in grinding out fight after fight to level up my characters.
  • AdVenture Capitalist - 2015 was a year of incremental games for me. A friend from work recommended this to me, and I got fairly obsessed for a solid couple of months. (This game is also available on Steam.)
  • Tap Titans - This was even worse for my sanity than AdVenture Capitalist. The one drawback with Tap Titans is that it’s an incremental game where the longer you play the more you actually have to engage. Unlike most incremental games, in Tap Titans, at higher levels your tap contributes so much damage (vs the automatic systems) that you have no choice but to play to progress, which is kind of backwards. Still, I think incremental games are a really interesting space, and Tap Titans is one worth playing.
  • You Must Build a Boat - Played 10 Million and loved it. This is mostly more of the same. One neat takeaway is how it gives players a sense of reward as you collect monsters that inhabit your larger and larger boat. They do absolutely nothing, but you feel awesome about your progress. It’s an incredibly cheap way to reward players and give them something to revel in when they log back in.
  • The Room Two - I didn’t finish this, but I enjoyed playing it on the train for a few weeks. Puzzle games like this one aren’t normally my cup of tea, but the production quality on The Room Two won me over enough that I was engaged for at least awhile. The problem with these kinds of games I have is that they ultimately get so complicated that it’s a matter of trial and error and poking around to get anywhere.
  • Out There: Omega Edition - I played this in 2014, and never beat it. I came back in 2015 and tried again, and failed again. Given my failures also trying to beat FTL (it involves me forgetting that you can pause the game), I’m wondering if space-themed roguelikes just aren’t my thing.
  • Mavenfall - Collect Mavens (characters) who each have their own custom deck of cards that you can modify, and play a turn-based PvP game with them. It’s a cute idea, but the execution is unfortunately flawed - there isn’t enough to do in the game once you finish the very short number of single player levels except to play PvP, but the vast majority of low level PvP matches are vs bots who aren’t even playing with a full team of characters. Sadly I think this game is destined to die soon, unless they add a lot more to the game and get more favorable re-featuring from Apple.
  • Dream Quest (again) - This game is so incredibly good. I played it in 2014, and I played it again in 2015. It’s a expertly done combination of roguelike and Dominion-style deckbuilding, with a light amount of metagame progression thrown in. The art is, uh, lo-fi, but you’re going to have to trust me. If anything I said above sounds remotely interesting, you have to play this game. It’s that good.
  • Eternal Arena - There have been a spate of successful Chinese iOS games lately that basically follow this pattern (this is the only one in English I can play):
    • 1) Make a virtual stick ARPG
    • 2) Make a MOBA built around it (use League of Legends if you need handy references for characters, items, whatever)
    • 3) Add everything you already know about Chinese-style progression (see Heroes Charge above)
    • 4) Profit
  • SongPop 2 - My wife and I play this together and stomp fools with our collective music knowledge. Something about the ticket economy doesn’t feel right in this game though - I feel like they could get a lot of value out of re-tuning it, BUT WHAT DO I KNOW.

Tried

  • Star Wars Card Trader - I just can’t care. I tried. For research. I get that it’s successful. But I also get that it’s Star Wars, and that makes people do crazy things.
  • Fallout Shelter - Sadly continuing the trend of “I don’t like all Fallout games after Fallout 1 & 2″. Maybe Fallout 4 will be different.
  • Auro - Tried this briefly but I was on an airplane and all the advanced tutorials are videos that required an internet connection. So I never really got what was going on. I’ll probably revisit this in 2016 though.
  • Alphabear - As far as word games goes, Alphabear is decent, though I am predisposed to like anything that Spry Fox makes. I think I just don’t like word games enough to get deeply enough into them.
  • Stormborn - Played the tutorial, saw it was another Clash clone (BUT WITH MORE HEROES), moved on.

Board / Card

  • Eight-minute Empire: Legends - I’ve only played this twice so far, but it’s an easily portable, quick strategy game that also comes with some expansions built in. I usually like heavier board games, but the portability of this is nice.
  • Caverna - I generally like this more than Agricola, and there are some new mechanics (like adventuring) that are really interesting. The thing that I sometimes miss from Agricola is the feeling that you’ve done something terribly wrong and oh god your family is going to starve oh god I hope no one takes day laborer or I’m totally screwed. Caverna is an embarrassment of riches by comparison, but still highly strategic and a lot of fun. It is, however, extremely heavy and decidedly NOT portable.
  • Exploding Kittens - I got this at a white elephant gift exchange. It seems better than Uno (I know, not high praise), but I’ve only played it once with two players (which seems pretty boring). Play it for the puns and the art, and then move on to…
  • Hanabi - The first co-op board/card game I’ve played that I actually like. Most co-op games have the problem of one or two people dominating the planning and everyone else kind of just going along. This is ultimately why I stopped playing and sold my copy of Pandemic. But in Hanabi it’s literally impossible for one person to dominate since everyone has some missing information (you play with your hand of cards showing to all other players but not yourself). It’s also extremely portable.
  • Codenames - I’ve only played this a few times at a friend’s house, but it was a ton of fun. It’s a very different kind of game (sort of a different take on Taboo but with less verbal diarrhea), and it’s remarkable that it’s designed by the same guy who also designed Through the Ages, Mage Knight, and many other vastly different games. Absolutely recommend (and I’ll probably have to buy my own copy soon).
  • Concept - My wife and I also played this the same night we played Codenames with some friends - it’s more of a group activity than a game (the way we played it), but it was still quite interesting. You are basically trying to describe concepts that range from simple (apple) to hard (”It’s not the end of the world”) through pointing at a series of icons. Bonus tip: This is also fun to try doing with Cards Against Humanity cards.
  • Bang! - I can sort of see why this game is so popular - it’s a very accessible gateway game that is better than most “American” card games (again, like Uno) but if you’ve played a lot of European style board games or card games, it’ll probably be a little basic. However, when I played it we only had 4 people which meant the hidden role part of the game was rendered kind of pointless - with more people (and more roles) there is an interesting Mafia/Resistance/Werewolf element layered on top of everything, which seems really neat.
  • Magic: the Gathering (Winston, Sealed) - I’ve played Magic for a long time, and this year was no different. We run a fairly large Sealed tournament at work every expansion, I mostly use it as an excuse to buy packs of every new set. Origins was particularly good to me - I opened 2 Jaces in my packs. I also got to play a Winston draft for the first time, which is a really neat 2-player draft variant that I hope to more with new sets.

Other

  • Kittens Game - The Dark Souls of incremental gaming.
  • TF2 Hat Idling Game - I like hats. This is not a very good incremental game. But it does have hats.
  • Swarm Simulator - A neat take on incremental games in that it upends the traditional model of building up higher and higher value production systems - you can sacrifice higher value pieces to improve the production efficiency of lower value pieces, which you can then spend on making more high value pieces, etc. Also has some other neat things like the prestige system, and spell-casting.

Books I Read in 2015

Another year, another set of books. My list from 2014 is here.

Favorite books


Non-fiction

  • How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen - Short and arguably worth the read. It didn’t change my life in any meaningful way, partly because it covers a lot of the same ground that career books like So Good They Can’t Ignore You and other “self-help” type books that are more focused cover in more depth. However, I’ve always liked Christensen’s writing, and the topics covered are a nice reminder.
  • Skyfaring: Journeys with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker - This book is arguably part poetic descriptions of flight (which are very well written), and part science/engineering lesson on the mechanics of piloting and flying, and part personal memoir. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend the book to anyone curious about flight or modern air travel. You can get a feel for how the book reads from this NYTimes article.
  • Start With Why by Simon Sinek - A fast, worthwhile read on how successful organizations market themselves externally and build a religion internally. It is a quick read, though some of the examples in the second half of the book felt long-winded to me. It also talks about Apple a lot as an example of an organization that starts with “why”, and some of the examples seemed a little like retroactive analysis.
  • Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) - Basically a series of essays on developing talent, networking, working relationships, etc. Most of the essays read like short blog posts, so there isn’t much depth to them. It was fine, but not terribly inspiring to me and I’ll probably pass on any future books from the series.
  • Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, 3rd Edition by Peter Bevelin - Farnam Street Blog recommends this book very highly, and it’s understandable when you realize it is basically a compilation of mental models, cognitive biases, heuristics, and explanations for how humans think. The problem for me is that (1) the book is not very well written or edited, and (2) in many cases is inferior to reading the original texts that Bevelin tries to cite (e.g., Thinking Fast and Slow). It does serve as a useful compilation and reference for the material it covers though, and so I don’t plan on throwing out my copy, but it doesn’t stand in for reading “the real thing”.
  • The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama - I really wanted to like this book, and for maybe 60% of it I really enjoyed it. Origins of Political Order is the first part of a two-book series that tries to answer the question “how did the various political institutions we have arise from tribal societies?”. And what caused Russia, China, the UK, Spain, and India to evolve in different ways? It’s meticulously detailed, but even I (as a history buff) could take so much detail on the Mameluk slave armies, medieval church politics, or Qin dynasty eunuchs. It is a very well-written book, and I would definitely recommend it, but only if you know what you’re getting into.
  • The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh - 100% recommend this to anyone working (in tech or otherwise), but particularly if you are a manager. It’s short (I finished it in a weekend), and re-thinks they employer-employee relationship in a way that resonated with me. Instead of the old model (”work for GE for life and you’ll get continual advancement and a pension”) or the mercenary world of tech, The Alliance tries to find a balance for how to create a mutually beneficial partnership (or… alliance, if you will) between employer and employee. I received a free copy of this from the YC list (in 2014 but only got around to reading it this year).
  • Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most by Hendrie Weisinger - I received a free copy of this from the YC list, and ended up liking the book. It covers the difference between stress and pressure, the negatives effects of pressure, and many concrete ways to combat these effects and excel in high-pressure situations.

Fiction

  • Books 1 & 2 of the Shadow Campaigns by Django Wexler
    • The Thousand Names: Book One of the Shadow Campaigns by Django Wexler
    • The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns
      I somehow accidentally stumbled onto two separate gunpowder fantasy series this past year. This was the first set I read, and I found the series worth reading so far (the 3rd book is out now but I haven’t gone back to read it). It’s heavier on the martial/military side than the fantasy side (though there is plenty of fantasy), and at times feels like the French Revolution with hints of magic and darker powers at work. It’s hard to make a judgement on the series until I read the next book, but the setting and writing are both great.
  • The Dread Empire’s Fall Trilogy by Walter Jon Williams
  • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Harumi Murakami
    • This was the first Murakami book I read, and also one of the rare times I read a fiction book that wasn’t strictly sci-fi or fantasy. There are certainly elements of fantasy and sci-fi in Hard-Boiled but the story it doesn’t feel like a standard version of either. It is full of allegorical meaning, humorous at times, and often very strange. It’s not my normal kind of fiction, but I’m glad I read it.
  • The Powder Mage Trilogy by Brian McClellan
    • Promise of Blood (The Powder Mage Trilogy)
    • The Crimson Campaign (The Powder Mage Trilogy)
    • The Autumn Republic (The Powder Mage Trilogy)
      The second of the gunpowder fantasy series I read this year, The Powder Mage trilogy pushes the fantasy and magic element much further than The Shadow Campaigns. Powder mages are people with magical affinity for gunpowder and it lets them do things like curve bullets or shoot ridiculous distances. Then there are lesser mages who have one specific kind of power (like someone who never needs sleep), as well as true sorcerers as well. I really enjoyed the series - even if you only read it for the unique spin on the magic system, I’d recommend them.
  • Books 1-5 of the Undying Mercenaries by B.V. Larson
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman
    • First Neil Gaiman book I’ve read (I KNOW), and while I think it’s worth reading, I was not swept away by it. I empathize a lot with the Amazon review that says:

I enjoyed reading it, and found it a real page-turner. The concept was fascinating and the mythological elements were interesting and clever in their American guises. […]

The problem is that I was expecting an epic. The book’s subject matter, length, awards, and reviews all scream epic. I was expecting something deep, meaningful, and memorable. 

  • The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton
    • The Reality Dysfunction (The Night’s Dawn)
    • The Neutronium Alchemist (The Night’s Dawn)
    • The Naked God (The Night’s Dawn)
      If you like science-fiction, stop whatever you are doing and read these. The universe within is so unbelievably developed and rich in interesting sci-fi ideas that I was completely absorbed the entire time I was reading the (extremely long) series. I have no idea how one person can build up such a compelling and deep world, and then go and do it again and again. The only problem (and I’ll admit it’s a big one) is that the ending is extremely deus ex machina. It doesn’t matter, they’re still worth reading, but make sure you savor your way through them instead of rushing through to the ending, because for this series in particular, it is the universe and the journey that matters. (Thanks again to Zach who also recommend these to me.)
  • Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam
    • Nexus (The Nexus Trilogy Book 1)
    • Crux (The Nexus Trilogy Book 2)
    • Apex: Nexus Trilogy Book 3 (Nexus Arc)
      Modern day sci-fi on posthumanism, including superintelligence, nano-machines, brain programming, and more. I think I liked the first book more than the complete series - the concepts are neat and well-explained, and the writing is clear and concise, but the second and third installments feel like an extended action movie. The plot is fine (though unsurprising), and the writing remains decent, but I wasn’t compelled with them the way I was the first book. I still think they are worth reading, even though they aren’t near the top of my sci-fi list - Naam does a great job of creating a believable set of consequences from the technology he is writing about, and for me that is the reason to read the books.

Overwatch vs TF2

Or, who is this game for?

(Originally published on Medium)

I have been playing an awful lot of Overwatch lately. I was fortunate enough to be invited into the closed beta, which marks the one and only time working in the gaming industry has given me a perk that “mainstream tech” folks are jealous of. At first glance, the game looks and feels a lot like Team Fortress 2, which is one of my favorite games of all time. However, there are meaningful changes to the design which significantly alter the experience, and beneath the super-friendly Blizzard style is actually a pretty difficult and (potentially) competitive underlying game. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.

Teamplay

Just like in Heroes of the Storm vs League of Legends, teamplay is sneakily upped in importance in Overwatch vs TF2. Because Overwatch is 6v6 instead of your typical 24-person public server match, working together is even more critical, and your actions have disproportionate impact. While competitive TF2 is indeed 6v6 as well, most players never end up playing that way, and the game doesn’t push you to do so.

As part of the hero design in Overwatch, everyone gets an ultimate ability — in other words, everyone has an uber they’re charging. Building these and timing their deployment will be critical to successful offensives and defenses, in a way that traditional FPSes haven’t really asked players to learn to do. While charging your ultimate in Overwatch is more forgiving than TF2 because you don’t lose your charge when you die, coordinating the use of your abilities with your allies (like in a MOBA) is important, and can outweigh individual kills or 1v1 duels. Strangely, Overwatch provides some tools to do this (e.g., you can use a chat command to tell everyone the % charge of your ult, and you can see a simple indicator in the scoreboard), but eschews some really obvious ones like showing a sidebar of every character and their ult status (like League of Legends).

The Tab scoreboard — the glowing check-mark indicates their ult is ready

Another key difference is the expectation that players should change characters to respond to the enemy composition in Overwatch. While this happens in public server TF2 matches (often begrudgingly), in competitive 6v6 TF2 it rarely happens. Besides the obvious additional skill/mastery required to play multiple characters well, it’s another way that your team has to work together to successfully win. While there are nice tools for pointing out team deficiencies at the start of a round (e.g., a warning for no supports or tank), these alerts aren’t as noticeable during a round, and even seeing your current team comp is somewhat buried— the only place to see this information is when you hit tab to see the scoreboard. I’ve played many games where I see the end-game lineup of characters on my team, and am surprised to see different characters my teammates are playing that I lost track of through multiple character swaps.

Pacing / Time-to-kill

Overwatch feels much, much faster. Games routinely end in 5–7 minutes (I think the fastest I had was getting utterly stomped in 1:48 or so), and even the longer games don’t seem to last much beyond 10–15 minutes. It’s clearly an intentional decision and mirrors what Blizzard has done with both Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone in reducing the overall time to complete a game. The result is that the whole game feels more frenetic. Characters (on average) seem to die faster, respawns happen much more quickly, and there are fewer capture points per level. The other contributing factor is the high mobility of many characters, and the number of paths enemies can take to reach you — not only do you die quickly in combat, it’s also very easy to be caught unaware from the side, behind, or above as well. While it’s not at Quake levels of franticness, the short respawn times can cause the gameplay to feel less meaningful. Most popular FPSes (like Call of Duty or TF2) have longer spawn times, and some (namely CS:GO) have none at all. The quick respawn system in Overwatch does make it friendlier, but again reinforces the need for teamplay to be able to win in an evenly matched game.

Different Playstyles

TF2 has nine classes, all of which play quite differently from each other. Overwatch basically takes those same classes (with the exception of the Spy) and explodes them into subclasses that all attempt to fulfill their role in a different way. So while Tracer and Genji are both of the TF2 Scout-archetype (fast-moving, with high-mobility, designed to flank and hit & run), there is a great deal of nuance, map-specific knowledge, and character match-up knowledge required to master each of them. It’s as if the TF2 archetypes are roles in League of Legends (top, mid, jungler, etc) and the Overwatch characters are each trying to fill one of those roles. Overwatch presents its characters in a high-level breakdown of offense, defense, tank, and support, but the reality is more complicated, and learning each 1v1 matchup on each map presents a long ramp toward mastery.

It’s more complicated than this

One of the things they’ve done really well in Overwatch is making each of the characters feel very unique and powerful. Playing Pharah (the flying / rocket-shooting attacker) and Soldier:76 (the mid-range assault-rifle guy who likes visors) require vastly different playstyles, despite both being “offense” heroes. Pharah basically never wants to touch the ground, and uses her height to attack unsuspecting enemies below, while Soldier:76 likes to fight at mid-range where he can back away to use his heal ability and then sprint-back to the front-line to fight. Both feel great to play, and pulling off a great ult with them feels incredibly powerful. Basically every character has the ability to make you feel like a superhero when played properly… a mass revive as Mercy can feel incredibly overpowered; grabbing someone with Roadhog is super satisfying; nailing a huge Death Blossom with Reaper in the middle of a crowd is undeniably awesome.

The Future

I’m curious how more casual players will deal with these changes. The color palette, style, and Blizzard branding all give the appearance of a more casual game, while mechanically being a lot harder than TF2 (both as an individual player and as a team). This juxtaposition hasn’t seemed to hurt Heroes of the Storm though, so it might not be an issue. But on the other end of the spectrum, many competitive players are complaining that Overwatch isn’t competitive enough, citing things like a lack of a true scoreboard, FOV controls, and frustrating netcode (see below). If Overwatch can’t satisfy competitive players, and is unable to fully ramp more casual players to the endgame (which at this point remains to be seen), it begs the question of who the game is for.

Overwatch is also curiously not F2P (unlike Heroes of the Storm). Blizzard has defended this decision as being necessary to let players switch between different characters to counter their opponents, but talking with Drew Harry makes me wonder if it’s due to the desire to launch simultaneously on console without having to risk an unproven F2P business model on those platforms. As mentioned, the game doesn’t provide strong cues for switching your character in response to opponents, and even the tips when you die are focused on how your current character relates to the enemy, not what other options might counter them (e.g., “Try switching to Symmetra to counter Bastion with her alt-fire.” instead of “Don’t engage Bastion head-on.”). Regardless what the reason is, it does mean that there is more risk that a large, long-term community doesn’t form around the game, which would be a shame. If fewer people play due to the game not being free, casual players churn due to the surprising difficulty, and competitive players don’t feel that the game really supports their level of competition, then 1) I’ll be really sad that a great game has no one around to play it, and 2) Blizzard will make very, very little back from their massive investment in Project Titan.

Just to be clear, I really hope this doesn’t happen — I’m a huge Blizzard fan, and a big fan of Overwatch so far, but I’m very curious to see how the game evolves throughout the rest of beta until launch and beyond.

Miscellaneous

Some other notes that aren’t directly related to the sneaky complexity of Overwatch:

  • Feedback when you hit an enemy needs work — the audio cue is surprisingly quiet (not sure why they didn’t go with a Quake or TF2-style “ping”) and actually hard to notice sometimes, particularly if you are trying to splash enemies around a corner. There are times that I feel like the audiovisual payoff for hitting enemies feels sort of floaty or unsatisfying, and I think a large part of this is audio.
  • I’m curious if they’ll provide a dedicated server option — it isn’t really Blizzard’s jam, and it’s certainly not the norm for console games. But a lot of TF2/Quake/CS/etc’s longevity came from dedicated servers; both for the community aspect, and the ability to run custom mods and maps. For a multiplayer-focused game on PC, I worry that this will hamper long-term engagement. On the other hand, it’s Blizzard. So who knows. It’s frustrating for me to not be able to choose a specific map to play repeatedly (especially since map knowledge is so crucial).
  • The level design is actually quite different from TF2. There are rarely wide-open spaces like the opening section of Badwater Basin or the entire first map of Goldrush in TF2. The levels in Overwatch actually feel like you’re in an urban environment, with tons of verticality, but also narrow corridors, hallways, and rooms. While there are maps with open areas, they’re often surrounded by a warren of passages in and out. Coupled with the extreme mobility of many characters makes combat more dizzying and sudden. In TF2, you are generally aware of where the enemy is coming from and you can largely ignore getting attacked from the rear (except by spies). In Overwatch, with the exception of the initial attack out of the gates, you rarely feel safe.

Lots of nooks and crannies in this hangar to murder each other in

  • Pharah strikes me as a great example of Blizzard’s approach to design. She’s your typical “soldier with a rocket launcher” character, but instead of forcing players to learn to rocket jump by looking down, timing your jump and firing, you hit shift to jump straight up into the air. It’s a classic example of something important that exists in a game or genre that is needlessly complex that Blizzard has identified and stripped out. See also: lands in Magic: the Gathering vs Hearthstone. (side note: I also love Magic despite this fact.)
  • Some reload animations feel off in their timing. A good example is Roadhog’s reload animation — it ends up taking longer than it looks like it’s going to, especially when you listen to the associated audio. If you use any ability while it’s still completing the reload animation, you’ll finish using your ability and still have not reloaded. It’s surprising how unpolished this is so far for a Blizzard game, and there are plenty of complaints on the forum discussing it. Part of this is due to the poor animation / audio sequence, but part of it is due to the fact that most weapons in Overwatch reload their entire clip at once vs one round at a time in TF2 (since reload times are shorter when you’re only loading one round).
  • The netcode feels bad at times, in a way that TF2 never did. More commentary in this reddit thread. I’m not really sure what to make of it except that I’ve anecdotally noticed it in Overwatch whereas I never notice it in TF2 unless I’m personally having a connection problem with high ping.
  • Finally, the biggest problem of all — the state of hats is pretty grim. McCree has a hat, and Pharah sort of does, though she’s always pictured holding it instead of wearing it (I mean, what’s the point!). There are lots of masks though, if that’s your thing.

Thanks to Drew Harry and Zach Brock for reading drafts of this, playing lots of games with me, and generally being neat people.

The Rise of Product Marketing on Mobile

Reading Benedict Evan’s post on manual curation reminded me a lot of what has been happening on Steam over the past year with the ridiculous explosion of new titles. It seems that Valve/Steam reached a similar conclusion late 2014 with the introduction of Steam Curators. It’s effectively bringing the various disparate individual/blog-based recommendations (e.g., famous YouTube personalities, or blogs like Rock Paper Shotgun) directly into the platform itself. Not terribly unlike Apple Music.

But it sort of feels like this isn’t really anything new, just a re-surfacing of content that exists elsewhere. I was already getting my game recommendations and reviews from Rock Paper Shotgun - there’s nothing new about Steam Curators that I didn’t have already. A quick glance at the top Curators shows that most of the ones at the top are people or organizations that already had a following off-Steam. And it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to start being famous through Steam Curators in the way that one might through YouTube, Twitch, blogging, etc.

I wonder if ultimately the discovery problem is something that the platforms can’t solve (and maybe don’t need to) - it’s not as if Amazon recommendations are the only way I hear about new books to read. It’s always been trusted 3rd parties that provide the most relevant recommendations, whether it’s your friend or a blog you read. And perhaps the central authority inherent in any major platform is at odds with the idea of a trusted source of personal recommendations (at least until personalized AI gets good enough).

It used to be enough for mobile game developers that you were a mobile game developer because there simply wasn’t much competition. Then in the early days of mobile UA buying installs was cheap enough that pretty much everyone could do it, which led to a reliance on performance marketing as the way to get players into your game. But now with UA costs rising, and without any forseeable relief coming from the platforms themselves (featuring is great but does not provide sustained installs), mobile developers are going to have to get good at marketing their games in the traditional way - figuring out the right messaging, creatives, and channels for their target audiences.

And if the PC / console markets are any indicator, things aren’t going to change anytime soon. Product marketing on mobile is jut getting started.

Books I Read in 2014

I decided to start keeping track each year of the books I read and the games I played. These aren’t all necessarily published in 2014, but I read them this year.

Favorite books

Non-fiction
  • The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China - David Eimer - Great read on the various non-Han minority groups in China. Sort of a combination of travel writing and history.
  • Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter - Tom Bissell - A nice collection of essays on video games (if you couldn’t tell from the title). I quite liked the writing, though a lot of it was more enjoyable that informational for me. Here’s another essay by the author on GTA V.
  • An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth - Chris Hadfield - I read this after reading The Martian (see the fiction section below). I didn’t care much for the life lessons bits (though they weren’t bad), but the personal anecdotes and stories about space alone are worth the read.
  • Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition - Geoffrey A. Moore - Started this, then stopped about halfway since it wasn’t terribly relevant to me. The basic gist was easy to get, and I’ll probably revisit if I go join a B2B startup.
  • Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip Heath - Pretty fast and fun read, with an easy to remember mnemonic for crafting sticky messages. Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories (SUCCESs).
  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King - Half auto-biography, half writing instructional. I haven’t read a single Stephen King book, but I still liked it.
  • The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande - This book suffers from the “should have been an essay” problem. The core idea is fine (use checklists), the delivery is too fluffy.
  • Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull - One of the best non-fiction books I read all year. Ed Catmull (of Pixar) talks about the history of the company, as well as how the company is run and structured. Particularly relevant for those in creative industries (like games!). So relevant that we (at Pocket Gems) bought a copy for every employee.
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz - If you read Ben’s blog, you’ll be familiar with the content. This book is primarily a collection of many of the essays that have been featured there on startup leadership and management. It’s packaged up in a nice way, though, and has a lot of lessons that anyone working in startups can learn from.
  • So Good They Can’t Ignore You - Cal Newport - The book I recommended to the most # of people this year. The basic premise is that the “follow your passion” credo is flawed. If you want a job that provides lots of great things (like autonomy, good compensation, etc) - you are asking for something that is rare and valuable, and you need skills that are rare and valuable to offer in return. Highly recommended for anyone who isn’t sure what they want to do with their life or who is consistently finding themselves unhappy with work (a phenomenon I feel is particularly prevalent in Silicon Valley).
  • Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era - James M. McPherson - I decided it was time to learn more about the Civil War after reading 1861: The Civil War Awakening. Consensus seemed to indicate that this was the best single-volume history of the war. I enjoyed it, but you probably need to be a military history or Civil War buff to do the same.
  • Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist - Roger Lowenstein - Great biography of Warren Buffett, with plenty of tidbits on his investing theses, and general mindset. It’s an easy read, and a good starting point for anyone interested in Buffett or investing.
  • Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games - Rob Fahey - If you’ve never worked in free-to-play games, or have never played / studied them very seriously, this is a short primer to some of the terminology and ideas in the industry. If you already work in f2p games, it won’t teach anything new.
  • The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth - Clayton M. Christensen - Finally got around to reading the classic. I personally enjoyed all the anecdotes, but it’s not obvious how to apply the theory to every day business. The mantra of “be patient for growth, but impatient for profit” is a good one.

Fiction

Game Stores on Mobile and PC

This bit of news from RPS is pretty remarkable:

We’re not even halfway through 2014, and Steam has already added more new games than it did in the entirety of 2013.

Is PC gaming headed towards the fate of the iOS App Store, where there are eleventy-billion games and no one knows about 99.9% of them? Or is the App Store going to look more like traditional PC gaming over time, with bigger production and marketing budgets sitting alongside a plethora of highly available indie games?

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Indies have been on the rise for PC due to the decreasing cost of creating (through things like Unity, GameMaker) and distributing (through Steam, the Humble Store, and others) games. You could argue that on iOS, the same mechanics exist, taken to an extreme. It’s always been cheap to make mobile games (vs traditional AAA titles) and throw them on the App Store, and so there are many more titles.

On the flip side, since there are so many titles on mobile, standing out has gotten harder and harder. Fewer and fewer companies have the budgets to market a new game to the level required. A large part of this is the lack of discoverability on mobile. As shoddy as Steam is (I love Steam, but this is another story for another day), it’s a hell of a lot better at surfacing things than the App Store.

But if Steam is actually dropping Greenlight, then we’re going to need another way to deal with the glut of games. Maybe, as a commentator on RPS suggests, the answer is more storefronts (like GOG, Humble Bundle, etc) but no one really knows. Valve/Steam really are the gatekeepers on PC (whether they like it or not) right now, so the next few years will be interesting to say the least. Less restrictive gatekeepers than our overlords at Apple, but in control of a lot of market-making levers nonetheless. Interesting times to be a gamer, indeed.

Killstreaks

Last week I read this critique of Titanfall’s “unlock” system, as compared to Call of Duty. “Unlock” isn’t really the right word, since the author isn’t talking about Titanfall’s progression system (whereby you earn XP by playing and completing challenges, and level up to earn new weapons / modifications / etc). Rather, the argument is something like: Since you have access to really powerful features (like dropping Titans) as a new player, you’ll get bored since more power isn’t unlocked over time.

Yet this supposed solution also creates new problems. What you get in the first round is what you get in every match you play, and while unlocks, loadouts and Burn Cards offer flexibility and empower different playstyles, they don’t afford any tangible increase in power. As you get better, you get your hands on the toys quicker, but none ever really boosts your chances of winning.

The author’s example of a better system is the killstreak implementation in CoD 4: MW. If, and only if, you are able to run up a high killstreak are you allowed to summon an AC-130, tactical nuke, or other high-tech shenanigans. The point is that this system makes it a much rarer event to unleash something truly powerful (which is true), and that is therefore better because otherwise the game would become stale (which I disagree with).

The reaction that came to mind when I read the article was, “What about Team Fortress 2? Or Quake? Or CounterStrike: Any Version Ever?” None of these best-in-class multiplayer FPSes have killstreaks that unlock temporary power boosts, yet seem to have no problem flourishing.

Killstreaks encourage a specific kind of gameplay that may make sense in a Call of Duty world. It is less obvious they would make Quake 3 a better or longer-lasting game.

I was expecting a critique of the weapon unlock system in Titanfall - why am I forced to grind through 50 levels of XP to play with all the toys I paid $60 for? Titanfall’s progression system has it’s issues, but one of them is definitely not the fact that you get to drop Titans all. the. goddamn. time. The name of the game is Titanfall - how on earth would it be better served by only letting players summon a Titans when they reached a killstreak of 10? The article closes with:

Clearly, Respawn will tinker with Titanfall’s framework in the inevitable sequels to come. As it does, it would do well to remind itself why the multiplayer FPS exists. When power is permanent, the fantasy rather loses its shine.

Multiplayer FPSes exist because it is fun to be a badass and to crush your opponents. The authors would do well to remind themselves that blanket applying a mechanic from one game in a genre to all other games in that genre is unbelievably short-sighted.

The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird

This review of Flappy Bird is by far the most amazing thing I’ve read all year. It may be the best review I read all year, despite the fact that we are only one month in.

But in fetishizing simplicity, we also mistake the elegance of design for beauty. For Go and Tetris are likewise ghastly, erupting stones and tetrominoes endlessly, failing to relent in their desire to overtake us. The games we find ourselves ever more devoted to are often also the ones that care very little for our experience of them. This is the devotion of material indifference. To understand Flappy Bird, we must accept the premise that games are squalid, rusty machinery we operate in spite of themselves. What we appreciate about Flappy Bird is not the details of its design, but the fact that it embodies them with such unflappable nonchalance. The best games cease to be for us (or for anyone) and instead strive to be what they are as much as possible. From this indifference emanates a strange squalor that we can appreciate as beauty.

On Free To Play

(Disclosure: I work at a company that makes free to play games. This opinion is my own.)

This weekend, the internet briefly went nuts again over the specter of in-app purchases destroying gaming as we know it. As a long-time gamer (I played the original Dungeon Keeper referenced in the article), I understand where the author is coming from, but the blanket vitriol directed towards IAPs and free-to-play is misguided.

The F2P version of Dungeon Keeper may nickel and dime players, but that’s a problem with the game’s design (I don’t know, I haven’t played it), not the entire business model. For every great game you pay up front for (XCOM, Dishonored, Minecraft, etc), there are plenty of games that charge $50 up front and end up being terrible (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?). Is this somehow more ethical than letting someone play a game for free before deciding whether they’re happy putting money into the system?

Additionally, F2P enables games-as-a-service where it would have been impossible (due to financial constraints) before. I’ve personally logged hundreds of hours in Team Fortress 2 and appreciated the endless updates Valve has put into the game – if they only charged a fixed amount up front, what incentive do they have to continue supporting the community of players who are no longer paying?

It’s not all black and white. There are terribly designed F2P games, and there are games like League of Legends, or Puzzle and Dragons that are perfectly playable as a non-paying player, and provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment. There are paid games that cost $60 up front that are worth the investment, and there are others that cause deep regret (*cough* Diablo 3).

I agree that on mobile, F2P has dominated the industry which makes it hard for games like XCOM or Oceanhorn to bubble up to the top, but this is actually a discovery problem. Since the app charts are built around the most downloads and top grossing, they are naturally dominated by F2P games which can acquire more users, and make more money. On PC, Steam / Steam Greenlight / Humble Indie Bundle / GoG.com and others make it easy to discover high quality games that aren’t just ranked by top downloads or grossing statistics. If you’re on mobile, you don’t have these other outlets (for now).

As a life-long gamer, I’m excited by the future of mobile gaming. I routinely put money into F2P games (LoL, Puzzle and Dragons, and TF2 all top my list), and also buy full games (Super Hexagon, XCOM, GTA V, etc). In the long run, the most successful games and franchises will be the ones that focus on creating delight for their players, regardless of the business model.